Monday, January 27, 2014

From the Greek word for goal, task, completion, or
perfection. Teleological explanations attempt to account for things and
features by appeal to their contribution to optimal states, or the normal
functioning, or the attainment of goals, of wholes or systems they belong to.
Socrates' story (in Plato's Phaedo) of how he wanted to understand things in
terms of what is best is an early discussion of teleology. Another is
Aristotle's discussion of ‘final cause’ explanations in terms of that for the
sake of which something is, acts, or is acted upon. Such explanations are parodied
in Voltaire's Candide.

There are many cases in which an item's contribution to a
desirable result does not explain its occurrence. For example, what spring rain
does for crops does not explain why it rains in the spring. But suppose we
discovered that some object's features were designed and maintained by an
intelligent creator to enable it to accomplish some purpose. Then an
understanding of a feature's contribution to that purpose could help us explain
its presence without mistakenly assuming that everything is as it is because of
the effects it causes. There are many things (e.g. well-designed clocks in good
working order) known to have been produced by intelligent manufacturers for
well-understood purposes, whose features can, therefore, be explained in this
way. But if all teleological explanation presupposes intelligent design, only
creationists could accept teleological explanations of natural things, and only
conspiracy theorists could accept teleological explanations of economic and
social phenomena.

Teleological explanations which do not presuppose that what
is to be explained is the work of an intelligent agent are to be found in
biology, economics, and elsewhere. Their justification typically involves two
components: an analysis of the function of the item to be explained and an
aetiological account.

Functional analysis seeks to determine what contribution the
item to be explained makes to some main activity, to the proper functioning, or
to the well-being or preservation, of the organism, object, or system it
belongs to. For example, given what is known about the contribution of normal
blood circulation to the main activities and the well-being of animals with
hearts, the structure and behaviour of the heart lead physiologists to identify
its function with its contribution to circulation. Given the function of part
of an organism, the function of a subpart (e.g. some nerve-ending in the heart)
can be identified with its contribution—if any—to the function of the part
(e.g. stimulating heart contractions). Important empirical problems in biology
and the social sciences and equally important conceptual problems in the
philosophy of science arise from questions about the evaluation of ascriptions
of purposes and functions.

Functional analysis cannot explain a feature's presence
without an aetiological account which explains how the feature came to be where
we find it. In natural-selection explanations, aetiological accounts typically
appeal to (a) genetic transmission mechanisms by which features are passed from
one generation to the next and (b) selection mechanisms (e.g. environmental
pressures) because of which organisms with the feature to be explained have a
better chance to reproduce than organisms which lack it. The justification of teleological
explanations in sociobiology, anthropology, economics, and elsewhere typically
assumes the possibility of finding accounts of transmission and selection
mechanisms roughly analogous to (a) and (b).

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Senior British diplomat Robert Cooper has helped to shape
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's calls for a new internationalism and a new
doctrine of humanitarian intervention which would place limits on state
sovereignty. This article contains the full text of Cooper's essay on "the
postmodern state". Cooper's call for a new liberal imperialism and
admission of the need for double standards in foreign policy have outraged the
left but the essay offers a rare and candid unofficial insight into the
thinking behind British strategy on Afghanistan, and Iraq.

In 1989 the political systems of three centuries came to an
end in Europe: the balance-of-power and the imperial urge. That year marked not
just the end of the Cold War, but also, and more significantly, the end of a
state system in Europe which dated from the Thirty Years War. September 11
showed us one of the implications of the change.

To understand the present, we must first understand the
past, for the past is still with us. International order used to be based
either on hegemony or on balance. Hegemony came first. In the ancient world,
order meant empire. Those within the empire had order, culture and
civilisation. Outside it lay barbarians, chaos and disorder. The image of peace
and order through a single hegemonic power centre has remained strong ever
since. Empires, however, are ill-designed for promoting change. Holding the
empire together - and it is the essence of empires that they are diverse -
usually requires an authoritarian political style; innovation, especially in
society and politics, would lead to instability. Historically, empires have
generally been static.

In Europe, a middle way was found between the stasis of
chaos and the stasis of empire, namely the small state. The small state
succeeded in establishing sovereignty, but only within a geographically limited
jurisdiction. Thus domestic order was purchased at the price of international
anarchy. The competition between the small states of Europe was a source of
progress, but the system was also constantly threatened by a relapse into chaos
on one side and by the hegemony of a single power on the other. The solution to
this was the balance-of-power, a system of counter-balancing alliances which
became seen as the condition of liberty in Europe. Coalitions were successfully
put together to thwart the hegemonic ambitions firstly of Spain, then of
France, and finally of Germany.

But the balance-of-power system too had an inherent
instability, the ever-present risk of war, and it was this that eventually
caused it to collapse. German unification in 1871 created a state too powerful
to be balanced by any European alliance; technological changes raised the costs
of war to an unbearable level; and the development of mass society and
democratic politics, rendered impossible the amoral calculating mindset
necessary to make the balance of power system function. Nevertheless, in the
absence of any obvious alternative it persisted, and what emerged in 1945 was
not so much a new system as the culmination of the old one. The old
multi-lateral balance-of-power in Europe became a bilateral balance of terror
worldwide, a final simplification of the balance of power. But it was not built
to last. The balance of power never suited the more universalistic, moralist
spirit of the late twentieth century.

The second half of the twentieth Century has seen not just
the end of the balance of power but also the waning of the imperial urge: in
some degree the two go together. A world that started the century divided among
European empires finishes it with all or almost all of them gone: the Ottoman,
German, Austrian, French , British and finally Soviet Empires are now no more
than a memory. This leaves us with two new types of state: first there are now
states - often former colonies - where in some sense the state has almost
ceased to exist a 'premodern' zone where the state has failed and a Hobbesian
war of all against all is underway (countries such as Somalia and, until
recently, Afghanistan). Second, there are the post imperial, postmodern states
who no longer think of security primarily in terms of conquest. And thirdly, of
course there remain the traditional "modern" states who behave as states
always have, following Machiavellian principles and raison d'ètat (one thinks
of countries such as India, Pakistan and China).

The postmodern system in which we Europeans live does not
rely on balance; nor does it emphasise sovereignty or the separation of
domestic and foreign affairs. The European Union has become a highly developed
system for mutual interference in each other's domestic affairs, right down to
beer and sausages. The CFE Treaty, under which parties to the treaty have to
notify the location of their heavy weapons and allow inspections, subjects
areas close to the core of sovereignty to international constraints. It is
important to realise what an extraordinary revolution this is. It mirrors the
paradox of the nuclear age, that in order to defend yourself, you had to be
prepared to destroy yourself. The shared interest of European countries in
avoiding a nuclear catastrophe has proved enough to overcome the normal
strategic logic of distrust and concealment. Mutual vulnerability has become
mutual transparency.

The main characteristics of the postmodern world are as
follows:

· The breaking down of the distinction between
domestic and foreign affairs.

· The rejection of force for resolving disputes
and the consequent codification of self-enforced rules of behaviour.

· The growing irrelevance of borders: this has
come about both through the changing role of the state, but also through
missiles, motor cars and satellites.

· Security is based on transparency, mutual
openness, interdependence and mutual vulnerability.

The conception of an International Criminal Court is a
striking example of the postmodern breakdown of the distinction between
domestic and foreign affairs. In the postmodern world, raison d'ètat and the
amorality of Machiavelli's theories of statecraft, which defined international
relations in the modern era, have been replaced by a moral consciousness that
applies to international relations as well as to domestic affairs: hence the
renewed interest in what constitutes a just war.

While such a system does deal with the problems that made
the balance-of-power unworkable, it does not entail the demise of the nation
state. While economy, law-making and defence may be increasingly embedded in
international frameworks, and the borders of territory may be less important,
identity and democratic institutions remain primarily national. Thus
traditional states will remain the fundamental unit of international relations
for the foreseeable future, even though some of them may have ceased to behave
in traditional ways.

What is the origin of this basic change in the state system?
The fundamental point is that "the world's grown honest". A large
number of the most powerful states no longer want to fight or conquer. It is
this that gives rise to both the pre-modern and postmodern worlds. Imperialism
in the traditional sense is dead, at least among the Western powers.

If this is true, it follows that we should not think of the
EU or even NATO as the root cause of the half century of peace we have enjoyed
in Western Europe. The basic fact is that Western European countries no longer
want to fight each other. NATO and the EU have, nevertheless, played an
important role in reinforcing and sustaining this position. NATO's most
valuable contribution has been the openness it has created. NATO was, and is a
massive intra-western confidence-building measure. It was NATO and the EU that
provided the framework within which Germany could be reunited without posing a
threat to the rest of Europe as its original unification had in 1871. Both give
rise to thousands of meetings of ministers and officials, so that all those
concerned with decisions involving war and peace know each other well. Compared
with the past, this represents a quality and stability of political relations
never known before.

The EU is the most developed example of a postmodern system.
It represents security through transparency, and transparency through
interdependence. The EU is more a transnational than a supra-national system, a
voluntary association of states rather than the subordination of states to a
central power. The dream of a European state is one left from a previous age.
It rests on the assumption that nation states are fundamentally dangerous and
that the only way to tame the anarchy of nations is to impose hegemony on them.
But if the nation-state is a problem then the super-state is certainly not a
solution.

European states are not the only members of the postmodern
world. Outside Europe, Canada is certainly a postmodern state; Japan is by
inclination a postmodern state, but its location prevents it developing more
fully in this direction. The USA is the more doubtful case since it is not
clear that the US government or Congress accepts either the necessity or
desirability of interdependence, or its corollaries of openness, mutual
surveillance and mutual interference, to the same extent as most European
governments now do. Elsewhere, what in Europe has become a reality is in many
other parts of the world an aspiration. ASEAN, NAFTA, MERCOSUR and even OAU
suggest at least the desire for a postmodern environment, and though this wish
is unlikely to be realised quickly, imitation is undoubtedly easier than invention.

Within the postmodern world, there are no security threats
in the traditional sense; that is to say, its members do not consider invading
each other. Whereas in the modern world , following Clausewitz' dictum war is
an instrument of policy in the postmodern world it is a sign of policy failure.
But while the members of the postmodern world may not represent a danger to one
another, both the modern and pre-modern zones pose threats.

The threat from the modern world is the most familiar. Here,
the classical state system, from which the postmodern world has only recently
emerged, remains intact, and continues to operate by the principles of empire
and the supremacy of national interest. If there is to be stability it will
come from a balance among the aggressive forces. It is notable how few are the
areas of the world where such a balance exists. And how sharp the risk is that
in some areas there may soon be a nuclear element in the equation.

The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the
idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and
open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of
states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the
rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception,
whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth
century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but
when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.
In the prolonged period of peace in Europe, there has been a temptation to
neglect our defences, both physical and psychological. This represents one of
the great dangers of the postmodern state.

The challenge posed by the pre-modern world is a new one.
The pre-modern world is a world of failed states. Here the state no longer
fulfils Weber's criterion of having the monopoly on the legitimate use of
force. Either it has lost the legitimacy or it has lost the monopoly of the use
of force; often the two go together. Examples of total collapse are relatively
rare, but the number of countries at risk grows all the time. Some areas of the
former Soviet Union are candidates, including Chechnya. All of the world's
major drug-producing areas are part of the pre-modern world. Until recently
there was no real sovereign authority in Afghanistan; nor is there in upcountry
Burma or in some parts of South America, where drug barons threaten the state's
monopoly on force. All over Africa countries are at risk. No area of the world
is without its dangerous cases. In such areas chaos is the norm and war is a
way of life. In so far as there is a government it operates in a way similar to
an organised crime syndicate.

The premodern state may be too weak even to secure its home
territory, let alone pose a threat internationally, but it can provide a base
for non-state actors who may represent a danger to the postmodern world. If
non-state actors, notably drug, crime, or terrorist syndicates take to using
premodern bases for attacks on the more orderly parts of the world, then the
organised states may eventually have to respond. If they become too dangerous
for established states to tolerate, it is possible to imagine a defensive
imperialism. It is not going too far to view the West's response to Afghanistan
in this light.

How should we deal with the pre-modern chaos? To become
involved in a zone of chaos is risky; if the intervention is prolonged it may
become unsustainable in public opinion; if the intervention is unsuccessful it
may be damaging to the government that ordered it. But the risks of letting
countries rot, as the West did Afghanistan, may be even greater.

What form should intervention take? The most logical way to
deal with chaos, and the one most employed in the past is colonisation. But
colonisation is unacceptable to postmodern states (and, as it happens, to some
modern states too). It is precisely because of the death of imperialism that we
are seeing the emergence of the pre-modern world. Empire and imperialism are
words that have become a form of abuse in the postmodern world. Today, there
are no colonial powers willing to take on the job, though the opportunities,
perhaps even the need for colonisation is as great as it ever was in the
nineteenth century. Those left out of the global economy risk falling into a
vicious circle. Weak government means disorder and that means falling
investment. In the 1950s, South Korea had a lower GNP per head than Zambia: the
one has achieved membership of the global economy, the other has not.

All the conditions for imperialism are there, but both the
supply and demand for imperialism have dried up. And yet the weak still need
the strong and the strong still need an orderly world. A world in which the
efficient and well governed export stability and liberty, and which is open for
investment and growth - all of this seems eminently desirable.

What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one
acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already
discern its outline: an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring
order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle.

Postmodern imperialism takes two forms. First there is the
voluntary imperialism of the global economy. This is usually operated by an
international consortium through International Financial Institutions such as
the IMF and the World Bank - it is characteristic of the new imperialism that
it is multilateral. These institutions provide help to states wishing to find
their way back into the global economy and into the virtuous circle of
investment and prosperity. In return they make demands which, they hope, address
the political and economic failures that have contributed to the original need
for assistance. Aid theology today increasingly emphasises governance. If
states wish to benefit, they must open themselves up to the interference of
international organisations and foreign states (just as, for different reasons,
the postmodern world has also opened itself up.)

The second form of postmodern imperialism might be called
the imperialism of neighbours. Instability in your neighbourhood poses threats
which no state can ignore. Misgovernment, ethnic violence and crime in the
Balkans poses a threat to Europe. The response has been to create something
like a voluntary UN protectorate in Bosnia and Kosovo. It is no surprise that
in both cases the High Representative is European. Europe provides most of the
aid that keeps Bosnia and Kosovo running and most of the soldiers (though the
US presence is an indispensable stabilising factor). In a further unprecedented
move, the EU has offered unilateral free-market access to all the countries of
the former Yugoslavia for all products including most agricultural produce. It
is not just soldiers that come from the international community; it is police,
judges, prison officers, central bankers and others. Elections are organised
and monitored by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE). Local police are financed and trained by the UN. As auxiliaries to this
effort - in many areas indispensable to it - are over a hundred NGOs.

One additional point needs to be made. It is dangerous if a
neighbouring state is taken over in some way by organised or disorganised crime
- which is what state collapse usually amounts to. But Usama bin Laden has now
demonstrated for those who had not already realised, that today all the world
is, potentially at least, our neighbour.

The Balkans are a special case. Elsewhere in Central and
Eastern Europe the EU is engaged in a programme which will eventually lead to
massive enlargement. In the past empires have imposed their laws and systems of
government; in this case no one is imposing anything. Instead, a voluntary
movement of self-imposition is taking place. While you are a candidate for EU
membership you have to accept what is given - a whole mass of laws and
regulations - as subject countries once did. But the prize is that once you are
inside you will have a voice in the commonwealth. If this process is a kind of
voluntary imperialism, the end state might be describes as a cooperative
empire. 'Commonwealth' might indeed not be a bad name.

The postmodern EU offers a vision of cooperative empire, a
common liberty and a common security without the ethnic domination and
centralised absolutism to which past empires have been subject, but also
without the ethnic exclusiveness that is the hallmark of the nation state -
inappropriate in an era without borders and unworkable in regions such as the
Balkans. A cooperative empire might be the domestic political framework that
best matches the altered substance of the postmodern state: a framework in
which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates
and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal. The lightest of
touches will be required from the centre; the 'imperial bureaucracy' must be
under control, accountable, and the servant, not the master, of the
commonwealth. Such an institution must be as dedicated to liberty and democracy
as its constituent parts. Like Rome, this commonwealth would provide its
citizens with some of its laws, some coins and the occasional road.

That perhaps is the vision. Can it be realised? Only time
will tell. The question is how much time there may be. In the modern world the
secret race to acquire nuclear weapons goes on. In the premodern world the
interests of organised crime - including international terrorism - grow greater
and faster than the state. There may not be much time left.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Man’s significant achievement is civilization, the continual
raising of human powers to a higher unfolding, a continually increasing mastery
of, or control over, external or physical nature and over internal or human
nature. Civilization is an accumulative activity. Both its aspects, control of
physical nature and control of human nature, are added to from generation to
generation and the whole is an accumulation of ages. In the present, the
progress of control over physical
nature, of harnessing
external nature to man's use, has been so rapid and has been
carried so far beyond what had been taken to be the limit of human powers, that
it has all but blinded us to the other side, the control of internal nature.
But in truth the two are interdependent. It is the control over internal or
human nature which has made possible the division of labor by which the
harnessing of physical nature has been made possible. If men were subject to
constant aggression from their fellows, if they could not safely assume that
they could go about their daily tasks free from attack, there could not be the
experiment and research and investigation which have enabled man to inherit the
earth and to maintain and increase that inheritance. The accumulation from
generation to generation would be dissipated if it were not for the check upon
man's destructive instincts which is achieved through accumulated control of
internal nature. But the control over external nature relieves the pressure of
the environment in which man lives and enables the accumulated control over
internal nature to persist and increase.

In the history of civilization the outstanding period, from
the standpoint of control over internal nature, is classical antiquity, the
Greek-Hellenistic-Roman civilization, which happily kept no small degree of
continuity during the Middle Ages, and was revived at the Renaissance. This
period is as marked for one side of civilization as the nineteenth century and
the present are likely to be held in the future for the other side. Indeed, the
civilization of ancient Greece, carried on in the Hellenistic era and
established for the world by the organizing and administrative genius of the
Romans, is a decisive element in the civilization of today.

Art, letters, oratory, philosophy, history writing, are an
inheritance from the Greeks. Law, administration, politics, are an inheritance
from the Romans. The Greeks even worked out the field tactics to which the
military science of today has reverted. Greek and Latin are a preponderant
element in the languages which derive from Western Europe. Thus they enter
decisively into our thinking, writing, and speaking, and thus into our doing.
The last of the Caesars fell a generation ago. But the principles of adjusting
human relations and ordering human conduct worked out in theory by Greek
philosophers and made into law by Roman jurists of the days of the first
Caesars govern in the tribunals of today. Latin was the universal language from
the establishment of Roman hegemony and of Roman law as the law of the world
for at least nineteen hundred years. All modern literature in all languages is
full of allusions to the classics; of allusions to persons and events and
stories out of the poets and dramatists and historians of Greece and Rome. One
who knows nothing of the great authors of antiquity is cut off from the great
authors of the modern world as well. To take but one example, a generation
which grows up without anyone knowing Horace, has missed something
irreplaceable. To cease to teach the classics is to deprive the oncoming
generation of opportunity of fruitful contact with a decisive element in the
civilization in which it is to live. A generation cut off from its inherited past
is no master of its present. What men do is conditioned by the materials with
which they must work in doing it. On one side of our civilization these are for
the most significant part materials bequeathed to us by the Greeks and the
Romans.

But we are told that we are entering upon a new era. The
past is to be canceled. We are to begin with a clean slate. Our accumulated
control over external nature has gone so far that there remains only the task
of making it available for universal human contentment. Then there will be no
occasion for control over internal nature. The causes of envy and strife are to
go with want and fear. Mankind will settle down to a passive enjoyment of the
material goods of existence and will neither require nor desire anything more.

There are abundant signs of a significant change from the
ideas and ideals and values which governed in the immediate past. It is not,
however, a change to something wholly new. It is largely a reversion to
something with which the student of classical antiquity is well acquainted; to
modes of thought against which Socrates argued with the sophists, about which
Plato and Aristotle wrote in founding a science of politics, about which Stoics
debated with Epicureans, which Christianity put down, for a time at least, when
it closed the skeptical and Epicurean schools of philosophy.

Whatever the confident self-styled advanced thinkers of
today may be looking forward to, the immediate actual result is a cult of
force. We seem to be listening again to Thrasymachus, who argued that the
shepherd protects the sheep in order to shear them for wool and slaughter them
for mutton, and in the same way the political ruler protects the governed in
order to be able to despoil them. The sophists are coming into their own in
ethics, and Machiavelli is hailed as a prophet in a realism which in law and in
politics takes force to be the reality and those who wield the force of
politically organized society, as the representatives of force, to be the
actualities of the legal order and of the political order. A favorite phrase of
the realist is "the brute facts"; a phrase used not in sadness that
there should be such facts, but with a certain relish, as if brutality were the
test of reality and the discovery of brute facts argued superior intelligence
and discernment. In practice this makes force a test of significance. The
significant things in the world are force and the satisfaction of material
wants. Education must be shaped to the exigencies of these. Nothing else is to
be taught or learned. Such a doctrine carried into practice, a regime to that
pattern, would indeed give us a new world. But it would be new by reverting to
a very old type.

Biologists tell us that what they call giantism in an
organism is a sign of decadence. When the organism has developed to giant
proportions, the next step is decline and the ultimate step is fall. In the
same way, there are times in the history of civilization when things seem to
have become too big for men to manage them. They get out of hand. The social
order ceases to function efficiently. There is a gradual breakdown, followed after
a time of chaos and anarchy by a gradual rebuilding of a social order, which in
tum may develop a bigness beyond human powers of management and so break down.
It may be significant that today the air is full of grandiose schemes for world
organization.

The Hellenistic world was in such an era. The greater and
richer part of the civilized world had been swallowed up in the empire of
Alexander. An age of independent city-states was succeeded by one of great
military empires ruled autocratically. Later, the Roman hegemony, in which, as
it culminated in the Empire, every free man in the civilized world was a Roman
citizen, the law of the city of Rome had become the law of the world, and all
political authority was centralized in the first citizen of Rome, was another
era of the same kind. It is significant that the first citizen of such a state
became a military autocrat. The mark of thinking of such times is likely to be
disillusionment. Epicureanism arose in the period of the successors of
Alexander, and grew increasingly strong in the Hellenistic era. It throve in
the corresponding period of Roman history, the Empire from Augustus to
Diocletian and Constantine. It was the most firmly intrenched of the Greek
schools of philosophy, although it has contributed the least to the general
progress of thought. It was so well fitted to a period of bigness and incipient
decay that the Epicureans were the last school to give way before the rise of
Christianity. When the schools of philosophy were abolished, they were the most
widespread and tenacious of the anti-Christian sects.

Today, in another era of unmanageable bigness, we come upon
tenacious give-it-up philosophies once more. Epicurus was wholly indifferent to
the form of political organization of society. The real point in existence was
to lead a happy life. If he lived under a wise ruler, the man seeking a happy
life need have no fear of being disturbed. He could pursue a serene, untroubled
existence. If the ruler was a tyrant, the wise man, like Br'er Rabbit, would
"jes' lie low" and so escape the tyrant's notice and live an
undisturbed life of happiness. Today what Epicurus put as happiness, current
social philosophies put as security. The ideal is an undisturbed enjoyment of
the means of satisfying material wants. Put concretely it seems to be a vested
right in a life job with an assured maximum wage, fixed short hours, allowing
much time for leisure at stated periods, a prohibiting of anyone from an overactivity
which might give him an advantage, and compelling all to a regimented minimum
exertion that would obviate the exciting of envy, and a guaranteed pension at
the age of sixty, dispensing with the need of providing one's own reserve. This
is the ideal existence Epicurus pictured-the condition of a happy life, the
condition of perfect mental equilibrium, neither perturbed nor perturbable. In
contrast, the last century identified security with liberty. Men sought
security from interference with their activities. They sought to be secure
against aggression so that they might freely do their part in the division of
labor in a competitive economic order. They sought to be secure against
governmental action except so far as was necessary to free them from aggressions
of others. Now, instead of seeking to be secure against government, men expect
to be made secure by government. But they expect to be secure in a new way; not
to be secure in their activities but to be secure against necessity of
activity, to be secure in satisfaction of their material wants with a minimum
of required individual activity.

Very likely the change reflects the exigencies of a bigger
and more crowded world. Possibly it is due in part to the development of
luxury, leading to disinclination to the free competitive carving out of a
place for oneself which the last century took for happiness. At any rate,
freedom from worry about what one can achieve, renouncing of ambition to do
things, and acceptance of political events as they may happen, go together as
an accepted philosophy of wise living, as they did in the social philosophy of
Epicurus.

Marxian economic realism has much in common with the
Epicurean social philosophy. The static ideal of a happy life is to be attained
as we get rid of classes. It is assumed that when property is abolished all
competition between human beings will ease.
Everyone will live undisturbed, without ambition, without envy, and so freed
from strife. Once the class struggle has been brought to an end, Marx looked
forward to the same social ethical result as Epicurus. But there is nothing in
the history of civilization or in experience of human relations in a crowded world
to warrant such assumptions. We may be sure that after property is abolished
men will still want and claim to use things which cannot be used by more than
one or by more than one at a time. It is not likely that there will always be
enough at all times of every material good of existence to enable everyone at
every moment to have or do all that he can wish, so that no contentions can
arise as to possession or use and enjoyment . Nor is it likely in any time
which we can foresee that there will be no conflicts or overlappings of the
desires and demands involved in the individual life. Such ideas, however, seem
to go with bigness such as the economic unification of the world has brought
about in the present century.

Along with the disillusioned or give-it-up philosophies of
such a time there goes a changed attitude toward government. Instead of wanting
to do things, men want to have things done for them, and they turn to
government to do for them what they require for a happy life. But they have no wish
to be active in government. They turn to absolute political ideas. Eras of
bigness and autocracy have gone together. Today while we all do lip service to
democracy there is a manifest turning to autocracy. The democracy is to be an
absolute democracy. Those who wield its authority are not to be hampered by
constitutions or laws or law. What they do is to be law because they do it.
They are to be free to make us all happy by an absolute power to pass on the
goods of existence to us by such measure of values as suits them.

Such ideas of a happy life, and of politically organized
society as the means of assuring that happy life, require an omnicompetent
government. They require a government with absolute power to carry out the plan
of an undisturbed life of serenity, free from all envy, want, or worry, by
control of all activity no less than of all material goods. The restless must
be held down, the active must be taught to keep quiet in a passive happiness,
those inclined to question the economic order must be taught to accept the
regime of security in which their material wants are satisfied. Hence such a polity
must of necessity take over education. Men are to be educated to fit into the
regime of government-provided material happiness. Those things which will tend
to achieve and maintain such a regime are to be taught. All else is to be given
up. Either it will hinder the bringing about and making permanent of the new
regime or it will tend to impair it when established. There is no place for any
of it in the ideal regime.

Applied to international relations, the give-it-up
philosophies must be wonderfully heartening doctrine for dictators. Applied to
internal administration they are proving wonderfully heartening doctrine for
bureaucrats. Can we doubt that a sense of helplessness in the Hellenistic era
and again in the era of the later Roman Empire led to general acceptance of a
philosophy that taught to let the government run itself or the governors run it
in their own way? Can we doubt that a sense of helplessness in our time, a
feeling of helplessness to make international relations conform to ideals, leads
to acquiescence in theories of force; or that difficulty in an overcrowded
world to make adjustments of private relations according to law achieve ideal
results, leads to a theory of a law as simply a threat of state force and hence
of law as whatever officials do in applying that force?

But if we are moved at times to feel helpless and give up to
power and force, those who wield the force of politically organized society
have no misgivings. They have supreme confidence that the omnicompetence of the
state means the omnicompetence of the officials who act in the name and by the
authority of the state, and are ready, assuming themselves to be ex-officio
experts, to prescribe detailed regulations for every human activity.

We recognize such conditions when we look at them as they
are manifest in the older parts of the world. We have not been prepared to see
them as they have been developing gradually but steadily in our own polity. As
a leader in American legal education has put it, it is simply a question of
what we expect government to do. If we expect it to provide for all our wants
by a benevolent paternal care and maternal solicitude, we must expect to
surrender to it all responsibility and invest it-and that means those persons
who carry it on-with all power. Such a regime is fostered by the exigencies of
war. But it was growing long before the war and independent of war conditions.
The give-it-up philosophies were taught and preached before and apart from the
war. They have been urged by a strong group in both English and American institutions
of learning and are propagated today by teachers who advocate an unrestrained
administrative power over liberty and property.

What is happening, what is to happen, to the humanities in
such a time?

In this connection we must note another characteristic of
the time, namely, distrust of reason. In this respect also the thought of today
is akin to that of Epicurus. We are taught by the psychological realists that
consciously or unconsciously men do what they wish to do and then justify what
they have done by reasons conjured up by a desire to be reasonable, which
nevertheless are not the real determinants of their behavior. Consequently, by
not distinguishing reason from reasons, reason comes to be regarded as a mere
name for specious justifying to oneself of what one desires to do and does
accordingly. Reason is taken to be illusion. The reality is taken to be the
wish, achieved by force or by the force of a politically organized society.
This is brought out notably in the difference between the biographies of the
last century and those of today. The biographies of the last century were taken
up with what their subject did and how he did it. They assume that he had
reasons for what he did which were consistent with his purposes and
professions, and that his mistakes were due to miscalculation, unless the
evidence constrains a different conclusion. The biographies of today are taken
up with their subject's hidden motives; if not very creditable, so much the
better as the biographer sees it. The evidence does not disclose the motives.
The assumed motives interpret the evidence. If the biographer can show that
George Washington's motives may be made out to have been not always very
creditable, it only goes to show that his actions were after all merely
phenomena and to remind us that it is unscientific to apply our subjective
ideas of praise and blame to phenomena.

At any rate, we can find one powerful antidote to such
teachings in the humanities, and it is perhaps for that reason that the advocates
of so-called realism would suppress the teaching of them. At the beginning of
the present century the German Emperor objected to the education which, he
said, trained the youth to be young Greeks and Romans instead of to be modem
Germans. But the results of education to be Germans ought to give us pause if
we think to make Americans by an education that seeks to make Americans to a
pattern of a land given up to satisfaction of material wants provided by a
regime of absolute government .

But I hear people say, the aggregate of knowledge has become
so vast that teaching must be confined to those things that count in the world
of today. There are translations of the classics available in English and those
whose interests lead them to explore the writings of antiquity can find what
they seek in those translations. It is a waste of the time that must be given
to the things of today to study difficult dead languages in order to find what
translations have made accessible in modern languages. The time is needed for
the natural and physical sciences, which teach us how to harness more of
external nature to producing the material goods of human existence, and to the
social sciences, which are to teach us how those goods are to be made to satisfy
human desires. Here we have three fallacious propositions: (1) that education
is only the acquisition of knowledge, (2) that even the best translation is or
can be a substitute for the original of a classic, and (3) that the social
sciences are so far advanced that we may rely upon them for objective judgments
of the social order and of the problems and phenomena of ethics and economics
and politics and jurisprudence. We have to learn the formulas of the social
scientists as we once learned the formulated dogmas of the natural and physical
sciences. Let us look at these propositions.

Knowledge as such is worth little without knowing how to use
it. It is likely to be so up-to-date that it is out of date tomorrow
.Discrimination, reasoned judgment, and creative thinking must work upon
knowledge to make it fruitful. No one can approach a mastery of all the details
of knowledge in even the narrowest field. But he can attain the wisdom that
will enable him to lay hold upon those details when and where he requires them
and to make something of them. Without this, the study of up-to-date subjects
as merely so many tracts of knowledge is futile. Very likely the supposed facts
will have ceased to be so regarded by scientists as soon as they have been
learned. The wise scholar, however, knows how to find them as they stand at the
moment and appraise them for his purposes, and he can often do this although he
approaches a subject in which he never had a formal course.

Wisdom is not gained by the use of translations. It is not
acquired when students write confidently about Aristotle without having read or
being able to read a line of him. It is not developed by slovenly use of
language such as follows from never having been compelled to compare the same
thought expressed in two languages and brought to see how different it may
appear unless the translator is sure of the words no less than of the idea.
What teacher of today has not seen confused thought bred of loose writing, due
to lack of the disciplined use of words which is acquired by learning the
languages from which even our scientific terminology is derived? What teacher
has not encountered the type of student who wants to write a thesis on poetic
usage and expects to use Pope's Iliad to show him the usage of Homer?
Who has not met students of church history who cannot read the New Testament in
the original, students writing on medieval philosophy and essaying to criticize
a great thinker who cannot read a word of Thomas Aquinas in the tongue in which
he wrote, students of legal history who cannot read Magna Carta as it
was written, students of history who must take the significant historical
documents at second or third hand? I have too often witnessed the pathetic
struggles of would-be students of our legal history to handle the monuments of
our law in the Middle Ages with no adequate grasp of the language in which they
were written. I shall not soon forget the graduate student who thought he could
read the Code of Justinian by the light of nature and was astonished to find
that conventus did not, as he supposed, mean convent but meant
agreement. Nor are such things confined to students. Who of us has not had
occasion to feel for the earnest teacher who missed the fundamentals of his
education in school and college and now is found struggling to gain what too
late he perceives he sorely needs? A great injustice had been done to all of
these by leading them to think they were acquiring an adequate foundation for
what they desired to do, and leaving them to discover their mistake too late.

Even now, when the majority of those who go to our colleges
have had some training in Latin, the teacher has learned to expect some almost
incredible atrocities due to ignorance abetted by carelessness. In my last
twenty years of law teaching I have become used to being told that in a
proceeding in rem the rem must be before the court. I have ceased
to be shocked when a college graduate tells me that son assaultdemesne
is Anglo-Saxon, that inpais is Latin, and that non compos
mentis is French. I can even keep a straight face when a law student, a
college graduate, reading in the books about the doctrine of the Good Samaritan
cases, asks me who the Good "Sarmatian" was. My friends in other
lines tell me of the entomologist describing a new insect who thought confluenta
was the feminine of conjluens, or the botanist who wished to coin a word
for "downward-directed" and with no knowledge of Greek consulted a
Greek dictionary and coined barithynetic – I suppose for katithynetic.
I have been told of a student of dramatics who spoke of "Andromash,"
and we have all heard "chaos" pronounced "chouse" and
"Chloe" pronounced "Shlowie" by those who held degrees in
arts. Those who perpetrate such things lack much more than a knowledge of the
classical languages. They have failed to learn what to do with the materials
with which they must work. We may be sure that these slovenlinesses will not be
the only ones of which they will be guilty. But what will there be when no one
who studies history or law or entomology or botany or dramatics knows any
better? It won't do to say, for example, that a law dictionary will tell the
law student what he needs. One must know something even to use a dictionary.
When it comes about that no one is taught in his teachable years the languages
and literatures which are at the foundation of what we say and write, our
terminology in every branch of learning must become chaotic, and loose writing
lead to loose thinking, and a general loss of morale in scholarship, of which
we see abundant symptoms already today.

We are told, however, that those things which are not indispensable
must in education in a democracy give way to those which are indispensable. As
to this one must make three observations. In the first place, it assumes that
democracy requires a common training for all, a training in the mechanic arts
and the sciences behind them, and in social sciences on the model of the
physical sciences. No one is to be allowed an opportunity of development
outside of this program of preparation for material production and politics.
Secondly, it assumes that education is complete on leaving school, and hence
that there need be no preparation for scholarly self-development of an element
needed in any other than a stagnant or enslaved population. Third, it assumes
that the social sciences are or can be such as the physical and natural
sciences are; that ultimate truths as to economics and politics and sociology
are impartible by teaching, and that knowledge of these truths is essential to
a democratically organized people.

I have no quarrel with the social sciences. I am now in my
forty­ fourth year of teaching jurisprudence, and for forty of those years have
taught it from the sociological standpoint. I have urged the importance of
ethics and economics and politics and sociology in connection with law in forty
years of law-school teaching. But I do not deceive myself as to those so-called
sciences. So far as they are not descriptive, they are in continual flux. In
the nature of things they cannot be sciences in the sense of physics or
chemistry or astronomy. They have been organized as philosophies, have been
worked out on the lines of geometry, have been remade to theories of history,
have had their period of positivism, have turned to social psychology, and are
now in an era of neo-Kantian methodology in some hands and of economic
determinism or psychological realism or relativist skepticism or
phenomenological intuitionism in other hands. They do not impart wisdom; they
need to be approached with acquired wisdom. Nothing of what was taught as
economics, political science, or sociology when I was an undergraduate is held
or taught today. Since I left college, sociology has gone through four, or
perhaps even five, phases. Indeed, those who have gone furthest in these
sciences in the immediate past were not originally trained in them. They are
not foundation subjects. They belong in the superstructure.

Notice how extremes meet in a time of reaction to absolutist
political ideas. In an autocracy men are to be trained in the physical and
natural sciences so as to promote material production. They are to be trained
in the social sciences so as to promote passive obedience. In an absolutist
democracy men are to be trained in the physical and natural sciences because
those sciences have to do with the means of satisfying material wants. They are
to be trained in the social sciences because those sciences have to do with politically
organized society as an organization of force whereby satisfaction of material
wants is to be attained. As an important personage in our government has told
us, the rising generation must be taught what government can do for them. The
relegation of the humanities to a back shelf, proposed by the Kaiser at the
beginning of the present century, has been taken over to be urged as a program
of a democracy. Such ideas go along with the rise of absolute theories of
government throughout the world. An omnicompetent government is to tell us what
we shall be suffered to teach, and the oncoming generation is to be suffered to
learn nothing that does not belong to a regime of satisfying material wants by
the force of a political organization of society. It is assumed that there is
nothing in life but the satisfaction of material wants and force as a means of
securing satisfaction of them.

America was colonized in a similar period of absolutist
political ideas-in the era of the Tudor and Stuart monarchy in England, of the
old regime of which the rule of Louis XIV was the type in France, of the
monarchy set up by Charles V in Spain, of the establishment of the absolute
rule of the Hapsburgs in Austria. England of the Puritan Revolution shook these
ideas violently and at the Revolution of 1688 definitely cast them off for two
centuries. The colonists who came to America settled in the wilderness in order
to escape them. When we settled our own polity at the end of the eighteenth
century, we established it as a constitutional democracy, carefully guarded
against the reposing of unlimited power anywhere. Moreover, these early
Americans, because they did not believe in an omnicompetent government or
superman rulers, set up institutions for liberal education. Within six years after
their arrival in the wilderness in the new world, the founders of Massachusetts
set up a college in order that there might continue to be a learned ministry after
their ministers who had come from the English universities were laid in the dust.
As our country expanded in its westward extension across the continent, state
after state in its organic law provided for a state university in order that
liberal learning might be the opportunity of every one. It was not till our era
of expansion was over and one of industrialization began that state
institutions for mechanical education were more and more established. But these
for a generation did not greatly disturb the humanities. The movement to
displace them is a phenomenon of the era of bigness.

Outward forms of government are no panacea. We can't do better
than we try to do. If we are content to lapse into a revived Epicureanism, if
we are content to seek nothing more than a general condition of undisturbed
passivity under the benevolent care of an omnicompetent government, we can very
well leave education to the sciences which have to do with providing the
material goods of existence and those which teach us how the government secures
or is to secure them for us. If we are not content with being, as Horace put
it, pigs of the drove of Epicurus, but seek to live active, human lives, even
at some risk of envy and strife and wish for things unattainable, we must stand
firm against projects which will cut our people off from the great heritage of
the past and deny them the opportunity of contact with the best that men have
thought and written in the history of civilization.

I cannot think that, when what is meant by the displacement
of the humanities is brought home to them, the intelligent people of America
will consent to bow the knee to Baal. I am confident that, as Milton put it, we
shall be able to speak words of persuasion to abundance of reasonable men, once
we make plain the plausible fallacy behind the idea of teaching only the
indispensables, and that the physical and the social sciences are the
indispensables . We can have a democracy without having a people devoted solely
to production and consumption. Those who are fighting to preserve the
humanities are working for a democracy that can endure. One which sinks into
materialistic apathy must in the end go the way of the peoples which have
succumbed to the perils of mere bigness in the past.

People appear to know other people better than they know
themselves, at least when it comes to predicting future behaviour and
achievement. Why? People display a rather accurate grasp of human nature in
general, knowing how social behaviour is shaped by situational and internal
constraints. They just exempt themselves from this understanding, thinking
instead that their own actions are more a product of their agency, intentions,
and free will – a phenomenon we term ‘misguided exceptionalism’. How does this relate
to cultural differences in self-insight? And are there areas of human life
where people may still know themselves better than they know other people?

For the past twenty-odd years, the main discovery in my lab
has been finding out just how unenlightened people are, at least in the terms
that Lao Tzu put it. People appear to harbour many and frequent false beliefs
about their own competence, character, place in the social world, and future
(Dunning, 2005; Dunning et al., 2004). If ‘knowing yourself’ is a task that
many philosophers and social commentators – from both Western and Eastern
traditions – have exhorted people to accomplish, it appears that very few are
taking the advice seriously enough to succeed.

But here is the rub. Although people may not possess much
enlightenment, according to Lao Tzu’s criteria, they do instead seem to display
a lot of wisdom. At least when it comes to making predictions about the future,
people achieve more accuracy forecasting what their peers will do than what
they themselves will do. Through their predictions, they seem to possess a
rough but valid wisdom about the general dynamics of human nature and how it is
reflected in people’s actions. They just fail to display the same sagacity when
it comes to understanding their own personal dynamics. As psychologists, they
appear to be much better social psychologists than self-psychologists.

The ‘holier-than-thou’ phenomenon

The ‘holier-than-thou’ phenomenon in behavioural prediction
perhaps best illustrates this paradox of greater insight into other people than
the self. The phenomenon is defined as people predicting they are far more
likely to engage in socially desirable acts than their peers. Across several
studies, we have asked people to forecast how they will behave in situations
that have an ethical, civic or altruistic tone. For example, we ask whether
they will donate to charity, or cooperate with another person in an experiment,
or vote in an upcoming election. We also ask them the likelihood that their
peers will do the same. Consistently, we find that respondents claim that they
are much more likely to act in a socially desirable way than their peers are
(Balcetis & Dunning, 2008, 2013; Epley & Dunning, 2000, 2006).

But here is the key twist: We then expose an equivalent set
of respondents to the actual situation, to see which prediction – self or peer
– better anticipates the true rate at which people ‘do the right thing’. Do
self-predictions better anticipate the rate that people act in desirable ways,
with people, thus, showing undue cynicism about the character of their peers?
Or do peer predictions prove more accurate, demonstrating that people believe
too much in their better selves? In our studies we find that people’s peer
predictions are the more accurate ones. Self-predictions, in contrast, are
wildly optimistic. For example, in one study, a full 90 per cent of students in
a large-lecture psychology class eligible to vote in an upcoming US
presidential election said that they would. They then provided another student
with some relevant information about themselves, such as how interested they
were in the election and how pleased would they be if their favoured candidate
won. Peers given such information predicted that only 67 per cent of
respondents would vote. Actual voting rate among those respondents when the
election arrived: 61 per cent (Epley & Dunning, 2000, Study 2).

Time and again we have seen such a pattern. For example, 83
per cent of students forecast that they would buy a daffodil for charity in an
upcoming drive for the American Cancer Society, but that only 56 per cent of
their peers would. When we check back, we found that only 43 per cent had done
so (Epley & Dunning, 2000, Study 1). In a Prisoner’s Dilemma game played in
the lab, 84 per cent of participants said they would cooperate rather than
betray their partner, but that only 64 per cent would do likewise. The actual
cooperation rate was 61 per cent (Epley & Dunning, Study 2).

Accuracy as correlation

But wait, a careful reader might say. People might prove
overconfident about their own behaviour, but surely they know more about
themselves than other people do. This accuracy just reveals itself in a
different way. Namely, if we look instead at the correlation between people’s
predictions and their actions, we might find a stronger relationship for
self-predictions than for peers. More specifically, people may overpredict the
chance that they will vote. But those who say they will vote will still be much
more likely to vote than those who say they will not. Forecasts from peers will
fail to separate voters from nonvoters so successfully.

This assertion is plausible, but it surprisingly fails
empirical test. When we look at accuracy from a correlational perspective, we
find that peers at least equal overall the accuracy rates of those making
self-predictions (see also Spain et al., 2000; Vazire & Mehl, 2008). In one
of our voting studies, peers who received just five scant pieces of information
about another person’s view of an upcoming election predicted that person just
as well (r = .48) as did people predicting their own actions (r = .51) in
correlational terms. Other researchers report similar findings: All it takes is
a few pieces of information for a peer to achieve accuracy rates that equal the
self. The behaviour can be a performance in an upcoming exam (Helzer &
Dunning, 2012) or performance on IQ tests (Borkenau & Liebler, 1993).

And, if the action is one that people find significant, and
if peers are familiar with the person in question, then peer prediction begins
to outdo self-prediction. Roommates and parents, for example, outpredict how
long a person’s college romance will last, relative to self-prediction (MacDonald
& Ross, 1999). Ratings of supervisors and peers outclass self-ratings in
predicting how well surgical residents will do on their final surgical exams
(Riscucci et al., 1989). Ratings of peers do better at predicting who will
receive a promotion in the Navy early relative to self-impressions (Bass &
Yammarino, 1991).

Misguided exceptionalism

Taken together, all this research suggests that people tend
to possess useful insight when it comes to understanding human nature. But this
research also suggests that people fail to apply this wisdom to the self. In a
sense, people exempt themselves from whatever valid psychological understanding
they have about their friends and contemporaries. Instead, they tend to think
of themselves as special, as responding to a different psychological dynamic.
The rules that govern other people’s psychology fail to apply to them. We have
come to call this tendency misguided exceptionalism.

What is it about their understanding of other people that
respondents exempt themselves from? We contend, with data, that people
recognise that others tend to be constrained in what they do. There are forces,
both internal and external to the individual, which are out of their control
but that influence how they behave. The smell of freshly-baked chocolate chip
cookies does break people’s willpower.

The opinions of the crowd place pressures on other people to
conform.

But these constraints are for other people. When it comes to
our own behaviour, we tend to emphasise instead our own agency, the force of
our own character, and what we aspire, intend or plan to do. Relative to
others, we believe that our actions are largely a product of our own
intentions, aspirations and free will (Buehler et al., 1994; Critcher &
Dunning, 2013; Koehler & Poon, 2006; Kruger & Gilovich, 2004; Peetz
& Buehler, 2009). We consider ourselves free agents generally immune to the
constraints that dictate other people’s actions.

Much recent empirical work reveals this differential
emphasis for the self. People think their futures are more wide-open and
unpredictable, and that their intentions and desires will be more important
authors of their futures than similar intentions and desires will be for other
people (Pronin & Kugler, 2010). When predicting their own exam performance,
people emphasise (actually, too much, it turns out) their aspiration level,
that is, the score they are working to achieve (Helzer & Dunning, 2012),
but they emphasise instead a person’s past achievement (appropriately, it turns
out) in predictions of others. College students consider their future potential
– or, rather, the person they are aiming to be – to be a bigger part of
themselves than it is in other people (Williams & Gilovich, 2008; Williams
et al., 2012). People predicting who will give to charity consider the
prediction to be one about a person’s character and attitudes – that is, until
they confront a chance to give themselves, in which case they switch to
emphasising situational factors in their accounts of giving (Balcetis &
Dunning, 2008).

College students harbour reservations about excessive drinking, but notrecognising that others also feel this same reluctance, they go alongwith the crowd

Misunderstanding situations

Ultimately, this misguided exceptionalism and overemphasis
on individual agency means that people fail to apply an accurate understanding
of human nature to themselves, one that would make their predictions more
accurate. People, for example, are surprisingly good at understanding how
situational circumstances influence people’s behaviour. In one study, we
described a ‘bystander apathy’ study to students. Students were shown an
experiment in which a research assistant accidentally spilled a box of jigsaw
puzzle pieces. These students were then asked the likelihood that they would
help pick the pieces up relative to the percentage of other students who would
help. Of key importance, participants were shown two variations of this basic
situation – one in which they were alone versus one in which they were sitting
in a group of three people.

Those familiar with social psychology will recognise that
people are more likely to help when they are alone rather than in a group
(Latané & Darley, 1970). In the group, people are seized by the inertia of
not knowing immediately whether to help, and thus taking their cue to do
nothing based on the fact that everyone else, lost in the same indecision, ends
up doing nothing, too. But would our participants show insight into this
principle? Not according to their self-predictions. Participants stated that
they would be roughly 90 per cent likely to help either alone or in the group.
They did, though, concede that other people would be influenced, and that the
rate of helping would go down 22 per cent (from 72 per cent to 50 per cent)
among other people by introducing the group. Of key import, when we ran the
study for real, we found that placing people in a group had a 27 per cent
impact (from 50 per cent down to 23 per cent) on actual behaviour. Again, peer
predictions largely anticipated this impact. Self-predictions did not (Balcetis
& Dunning, 2013).

This belief that self-behaviour ‘floats’ above the impact of
situational circumstances and constraints can lead people to forgo decisions
that would actually help them. Consider the task of staying within a monthly
budget. In one study, participants were offered a service that would provide
them with savings tips plus a constant monitoring of their finance. For
themselves, participants felt the service would be superfluous. It would have
almost zero impact on their ability to achieve their budget goals. What
mattered for them instead was the strength of their intentions to save money
(Koehler et al., 2011).

But, in reality, a random sample of participants assigned to
the service was roughly 11 per cent more likely to reach their budget goals.
And, a group of participants asked to judge the impact of the service on other
people estimated that the service would matter; that others would be 17 per
cent more likely to reach their goals. Again, predictions about others better
reflected reality than predictions about the self, in that people could
recognise the impact of an important situational aid on others, but felt they
themselves were immune to those influences (Koehler et al., 2011).

Cultural influences

This overemphasis on the self’s agency suggests possible
cultural differences in the holier-than-thou effect. And, indeed, such cultural
differences arise. It is the individualist cultures of Western Europe and North
America that emphasise autonomy, agency and the imposition of will onto the
environment (Fiske et al., 1998; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Far Eastern
cultures, such as Japan, emphasise instead interdependence, social roles and
group harmony – that is, social constraints on the self. Might those cultures,
thus, be relatively immune to the ‘holier’ phenomenon?

Across several studies, we have found that people from
collectivist cultures display much less self-error than did those from
individualist ones. For example, young children attending a summer school on
Mallorca were asked how many candies they would donate to other children if
they were asked, as well as how many candies other children on average would
donate.

A week later, the children were actually asked to donate.
Children from more individualist countries (e.g. Britain) donated many fewer
candies than they had predicted, but those from more collectivist countries
(e.g. Spain) donated on average just as many as they had predicted. Both groups
were accurate in their predictions about their peers (Balcetis et al., 2008).

Does the self have any advantage?

Extant psychological research, however, does suggest one
area where this general story about self- and social insight will reverse.
People may be wiser when it comes to predicting the public and observable
actions of others rather than self, but they do appear to have privileged
insight into aspects of the self that are not available for other people to
view. People know that below the surface of their public appearance is a
private individual who feels doubt, anxiety, inhibition and ambivalence that he
or she may not let wholly come to the surface (Spain et al., 2000; Vazire,
2010; Vazire & Carlson, 2010, 2011). Of course, this individual does not
see this roiling interior life in others.

As a consequence, people may lack awareness that what’s
inside themselves is similarly churning and stirring within others. Thus, for
example, people often consider themselves more shy, self-critical, and
indecisive than other people (Miller & McFarland, 1987). College students
harbour reservations about excessive drinking, but not recognising that others
also feel this same reluctance, they go along with the crowd to excess on a
Saturday night (Prentice & Miller, 1993). In a similar vein, college
students harbour much more discomfort about casual sex than they believe their
peers do, with each sex overestimating the comfort level of the other sex when
it comes to ‘hooking up’ (Lambert et al., 2003).

Concluding remarks

Thus, current psychological research suggests that people
may be wise, at least when it comes to understanding and anticipating other
people, but they stand in the way of letting this wisdom lead to their own
enlightenment. However, if research reveals this problem, it also suggests a
potential solution to it. What we presume about other people’s behaviour and
futures is likely a valuable indicator of what awaits us in the same situation
– and may be much better indicator of our future than any scenario we are
spinning directly about ourselves. When predictions matter, we should not spend
a great deal of time predicting what we think we will do. Instead, we should
ask what other people are likely to do. Or, we should hand the prediction of
our own future over to another person who knows a little about us.

Whatever we do, we should note that perhaps we are, indeed,
uniquely special individuals, but that it is too easy to overemphasise that
fact. In anticipating the future, we should be mindful of the continuity that
lies between our self-nature and the nature of others. It is in recognising this
continuity that we realise the path that leads to our wisdom may be a pretty
good path to our enlightenment, too. At the very least, that thought does
remind one of another Chinese proverb that has survived the centuries, perhaps
best indicating its worth – that to know what lies for us along the road ahead,
we should be sure to ask those coming back.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,
University of London Constellations, An International Journal of Critical
and Democratic Theory, Volume 20, Issue 1, pages 51-67, March 2013

A new ideal has triumphed on the world stage: human rights.
It unites traditional enemies, left and right, the pulpit and the state, the
minister and the rebel, the developing world and the liberals of the West. The
new world order, we are told, is genuinely liberal democratic. Ideological
controversies of the past have given way to general agreement about the
universality of western values and have placed human rights at the core of
international law. After the collapse of communism, human rights have become
the ideology after the end of ideologies, at the end of history, the morality
of international relations, a way of conducting politics according to ethical
norms.

And yet many doubts persist. The record of human rights
violations since their ringing declarations at the end of the eighteenth
century, after WWII and again since 1989 is quite appalling. If the twentieth
century is the epoch of human rights, their triumph is, to say the least,
something of a paradox. Our era has witnessed more violations of their
principles than any previous, less “enlightened” one. Ours is the epoch of
massacre, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. At no point in human history has
there been a greater gap between the north and the south, between the poor and
the rich in the developed world, or between the seduced and the excluded
globally. Life expectancy at birth is around 45 years in sub-Saharan Africa but
over 80 years in Northern Europe. No belief of progress allows us to ignore
that never before in ‘peacetime’ and in absolute figures, have so many men,
women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated.

There is a second paradox: if the world has accepted a
common humanitarian vision, have conflicts of ideology, religion, and ethnicity
ceased? Obviously not. This means that human rights have no common meaning or
that the term describes radically different phenomena. There is something more:
human rights are perhaps the most important liberal legal institution. Liberal
jurisprudence and political philosophy, however, have failed rather badly in
their understanding of rights. Two hundred years of social theory and the three
major ‘continents’ of thought, according to Louis Althusser, do not enter the
annals of jurisprudence: Hegel, Marx, the post-Marxists, and the dialectic of
struggle; Nietzsche, Foucault, and the analytics of power; Freud, the
post-Freudians, psychoanalysis and subjectivity. As a result, jurisprudence and
political philosophy return to the 18th century and update the social contract
with ‘original positions’ and ‘veils of ignorance,’ the categorical imperative
with ‘ideal speech’ situations and fundamental discourse principles all
referring to individuals fully in control of themselves.

The mainstreaming of human rights and the rise of
cosmopolitanism coincided with the emergence of what sociologists have called
“globalization,” economists “neo-liberalism,” and political philosophers
“post-democratic governance.” Is there a link between recent moralistic
ideology, greedy capitalism and bio-political governmentality? My answer is a
clear yes. Nationally, the bio-political form of power has increased the
surveillance, disciplining, and control of life. Morality (and rights as
morality's main building block in late capitalism) was always part of the
dominant order, in close contact with each epoch's forms of power. Recently,
however, rights have mutated from a relative defense against power to a
modality of its operations. If rights express, promote and legalize individual
desire, they have been contaminated by desire's nihilism. Internationally, the
modernist edifice is undermined at the point when the completion of the
decolonization process and the relative rise of the developing world create the
prospect of a successful defense of its interests. The imposition of
‘cosmopolitan’ economic, cultural, legal, and military policies is an attempt
to reassert western hegemony.

The wars of the new world order as well as the 2008 economic
crisis and its political culmination in 2011 give us a unique opportunity to
examine the post-1989 settlement. The best time to demystify ideology is when
it enters into crisis. At this point, the taken for granted, “natural”,
invisible premises of ideology come to the surface, become objectified, and can
be understood for the first time as constructs. The ‘humanitarian’
interpretation of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars highlighted the absurdity of
killing humans to ‘save’ humanity. The absence of human rights demands in
Madrid, Athens, or Occupy Wall Street indicated their limited relevance for the
most important movement of our times. In the wake of this world wave of
protest, several major themes of political philosophy need to be re-visited.

This essay briefly presents an alternative approach to human
rights built over a long period of campaigning and scholarship in a trilogy of
books.1 It follows the insight that the term human rights, with its immense
symbolic capital, has been co-opted to a large number of relatively independent
discourses, practices, institutions and campaigns. As a result no global
‘theory’ of rights exists or can be created. Different theoretical perspectives
and disciplinary approaches are therefore necessary. This article starts a
short history of the idea of humanity and moves to the political, legal,
philosophical, and psychological aspects of rights. To indicate this
multi-layered approach, it puts forward an axiom and seven theses that re-write
the standard liberal approach to rights.

The Human Rights Axiom

The end of human rights is to resist public and private
domination and oppression. They lose that end when they become the political
ideology or idolatry of neo-liberal capitalism or the contemporary version of
the civilizing mission.

Thesis 1

The idea of ‘humanity’ has no fixed meaning and cannot act
as the source of moral or legal rules. Historically, the idea has been used to
classify people into the fully human, the lesser human, and the inhuman.

If ‘humanity’ is the normative source of moral and legal
rules, do we know what ‘humanity’ is? Important philosophical and ontological
questions are involved here. Let me have a brief look at its history.

Pre-modern societies did not develop a comprehensive idea of
the human species. Free men were Athenians or Spartans, Romans or Carthaginians,
but not members of humanity; they were Greeks or barbarians, but not humans.
According to classical philosophy, a teleologically determined human nature
distributes people across social hierarchies and roles and endows them with
differentiated characteristics. The word humanitas appeared for the first time
in the Roman Republic as a translation of the Greek word paideia. It was
defined as eruditio et institutio in bonas artes (the closest modern equivalent
is the German Bildung). The Romans inherited the concept from Stoicism and used
it to distinguish between the homo humanus, the educated Roman who was
conversant with Greek culture and philosophy and was subjected to the jus
civile, and the homines barbari, who included the majority of the uneducated
non-Roman inhabitants of the Empire. Humanity enters the western lexicon as an
attribute and predicate of homo, as a term of separation and distinction. For
Cicero as well as the younger Scipio, humanitas implies generosity, politeness,
civilization, and culture and is opposed to barbarism and animality.2 “Only
those who conform to certain standards are really men in the full sense, and
fully merit the adjective ‘human’ or the attribute ‘humanity.’”3 Hannah Arendt
puts it sarcastically: ‘a human being or homo in the original meaning of the
word indicates someone outside the range of law and the body politic of the
citizens, as for instance a slave – but certainly a politically irrelevant
being.’4

If we now turn to the political and legal uses of humanitas,
a similar history emerges. The concept ‘humanity’ has been consistently used to
separate, distribute, and classify people into rulers, ruled, and excluded.
‘Humanity’ acts as a normative source for politics and law against a background
of variable inhumanity. This strategy of political separation curiously entered
the historical stage at the precise point when the first proper universalist
conception of humanitas emerged in Christian theology, captured in the St
Paul's statement, that there is no Greek or Jew, man or woman, free man or
slave (Epistle to the Galatians 3:28). All people are equally part of humanity
because they can be saved in God's plan of salvation and, secondly, because
they share the attributes of humanity now sharply differentiated from a
transcended divinity and a subhuman animality. For classical humanism, reason
determines the human: man is a zoon logon echon or animale rationale. For
Christian metaphysics, on the other hand, the immortal soul, both carried and
imprisoned by the body, is the mark of humanity. The new idea of universal
equality, unknown to the Greeks, entered the western world as a combination of
classical and Christian metaphysics.

The divisive action of ‘humanity’ survived the invention of
its spiritual equality. Pope, Emperor, Prince, and King, these representatives
and disciples of God on earth were absolute rulers. Their subjects, the
sub-jecti or sub-diti, take the law and their commands from their political
superiors. More importantly, people will be saved in Christ only if they accept
the faith, since non-Christians have no place in the providential plan. This
radical divide and exclusion founded the ecumenical mission and proselytizing
drive of Church and Empire. Christ's spiritual law of love turned into a battle
cry: let us bring the pagans to the grace of God, let us make the singular
event of Christ universal, let us impose the message of truth and love upon the
whole world. The classical separation between Greek (or human) and barbarian
was based on clearly demarcated territorial and linguistic frontiers. In the
Christian empire, the frontier was internalized and split the known globe
diagonally between the faithful and the heathen. The barbarians were no longer
beyond the city as the city expanded to include the known world. They became
‘enemies within’ to be appropriately corrected or eliminated if they stubbornly
refused spiritual or secular salvation.

The meaning of humanity after the conquest of the ‘New
World’ was vigorously contested in one of the most important public debates in
history. In April 1550, Charles V of Spain called a council of state in
Valladolid to discuss the Spanish attitude towards the vanquished Indians of
Mexico. The philosopher Ginés de Sepulveda and the Bishop Bartholomé de las
Casas, two major figures of the Spanish Enlightenment, debated on opposite
sides. Sepulveda, who had just translated Aristotle's Politics into Spanish, argued
that “the Spaniards rule with perfect right over the barbarians who, in
prudence, talent, virtue, humanity are as inferior to the Spaniards as children
to adults, women to men, the savage and cruel to the mild and gentle, I might
say as monkey to men.”5 The Spanish crown should feel no qualms in dealing with
Indian evil. The Indians could be enslaved and treated as barbarian and savage
slaves in order to be civilized and proselytized.

Las Casas disagreed. The Indians have well-established
customs and settled ways of life, he argued, they value prudence and have the
ability to govern and organize families and cities. They have the Christian
virtues of gentleness, peacefulness, simplicity, humility, generosity, and
patience, and are waiting to be converted. They look like our father Adam
before the Fall, wrote las Casas in his Apologia, they are ‘unwitting’
Christians. In an early definition of humanism, las Casas argued that “all the
people of the world are humans under the only one definition of all humans and
of each one, that is that they are rational…Thus all races of humankind are
one.”6 His arguments combined Christian theology and political utility.
Respecting local customs is good morality but also good politics: the Indians
would convert to Christianity (las Casas’ main concern) but also accept the
authority of the Crown and replenish its coffers, if they were made to feel
that their traditions, laws, and cultures are respected. But las Casas’
Christian universalism was, like all universalisms, exclusive. He repeatedly
condemned “Turks and Moors, the veritable barbarian outcasts of the nations”
since they cannot be seen as “unwitting” Christians. An “empirical”
universalism of superiority and hierarchy (Sepulveda) and a normative one of
truth and love (las Casas) end up being not very different. As Tzvetan Todorov
pithily remarks, there is “violence in the conviction that one possesses the
truth oneself, whereas this is not the case for others, and that one must
furthermore impose that truth on those others.”7

The conflicting interpretations of humanity by Sepulveda and
las Casas capture the dominant ideologies of Western empires, imperialisms, and
colonialisms. At one end, the (racial) other is inhuman or subhuman. This
justifies enslavement, atrocities, and even annihilation as strategies of the
civilizing mission. At the other end, conquest, occupation, and forceful
conversion are strategies of spiritual or material development, of progress and
integration of the innocent, naïve, undeveloped others into the main body of
humanity.

These two definitions and strategies towards otherness act
as supports of western subjectivity. The helplessness, passivity, and
inferiority of the “undeveloped” others turns them into our narcissistic
mirror-image and potential double. These unfortunates are the infants of
humanity. They are victimized and sacrificed by their own radical evildoers;
they are rescued by the West who helps them grow, develop and become our
likeness. Because the victim is our mirror image, we know what his interest is
and impose it “for his own good.” At the other end, the irrational, cruel,
victimizing others are projections of the Other of our unconscious. As Slavoj
Žižek puts it, “there is a kind of passive exposure to an overwhelming Otherness,
which is the very basis of being human…[the inhuman] is marked by a terrifying
excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity’ is inherent
to being human.”8 We have called this abysmal other lurking in the psyche and
unsettling the ego various names: God or Satan, barbarian or foreigner, in
psychoanalysis the death drive or the Real. Today they have become the “axis of
evil,” the “rogue state,” the “bogus refugee,” or the “illegal” migrant. They
are contemporary heirs to Sepulveda's “monkeys,” epochal representatives of
inhumanity.

A comparison of the cognitive strategies associated with the
Latinate humanitas and the Greek anthropos is instructive. The humanity of
humanism (and of the academic Humanities9) unites knowing subject and known
object following the protocols of self-reflection. The anthropos of physical
and social anthropology, on the other hand, is the object only of cognition.
Physical anthropology examines bodies, senses, and emotions, the material
supports of life. Social anthropology studies diverse non-western peoples,
societies, and cultures, but not the human species in its essence or totality.
These peoples emerged out of and became the object of observation and study
through discovery, conquest, and colonization in the new world, Africa, Asia,
or in the peripheries of Europe. As Nishitani Osamu puts it, humanity and
anthropos signify two asymmetrical regimes of knowledge.10 Humanity is
civilization, anthropos is outside or before civilization. In our globalized world,
the minor literatures of anthropos are examined by comparative literature,
which compares “civilization” with lesser cultures.

The gradual decline of Western dominance is changing these
hierarchies. Similarly, the disquiet with a normative universalism, based on a
false conception of humanity, indicates the rise of local, concrete, and
context-bound normativities.

In conclusion, because ‘humanity’ has no fixed meaning, it
cannot act as a source of norms. Its meaning and scope keeps changing according
to political and ideological priorities. The continuously changing conceptions
of humanity are the best manifestations of the metaphysics of an age. Perhaps
the time has come for anthropos to replace the human. Perhaps the rights to
come will be anthropic (to coin a term) rather than human, expressing and
promoting singularities and differences instead of the sameness and
equivalences of hitherto dominant identities.

Thesis 2

Power and morality, empire and cosmopolitanism, sovereignty
and rights, law and desire are not fatal enemies. Instead, a historically
specific amalgam of power and morality forms the structuring order of each
epoch and society.

We will explore the strong internal connection between these
superficially antagonistic principles, at the point of their emergence in the
late 18th century here and in the post-1989 order in the next part.

The religious grounding of humanity was undermined by the
liberal political philosophies of early modernity. The foundation of humanity
was transferred from God to (human) nature. Human nature has been interpreted
as an empirical fact, a normative value, or both. Science has driven the first
approach. The mark of humanity has been variously sought in language, reason or
evolution. Man as species existence emerged as a result of legal and political
innovations. The idea of humanity is the creation of humanism, with legal
humanism at the forefront. Indeed the great 18th century revolutions and
declarations paradigmatically manifest and helped construct modern universalism.
And yet, at the heart of humanism, humanity remained a strategy of division and
classification.

We can follow briefly this contradictory process, which both
proclaims the universal and excludes the local in the text of the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the manifesto of modernity.
Article 1, the progenitor of normative universalism, states that ‘men are born
and remain free and equal of right’ a claim repeated in the inaugural article
of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Equality and liberty are
declared natural entitlements and independent of governments, epochal, and
local factors. And yet the Declaration is categorically clear about the real
source of universal rights. Article 2 states that ‘the aim of any political
association is to preserve the natural and inalienable rights of man’ and
Article 3 proceeds to define this association: ‘The principle of all
Sovereignty lies essentially with the nation.’

‘Natural’ and eternal rights are declared on behalf of the
universal “man.” However these rights do not pre-exist but were created by the
Declaration. A new type of political association, the sovereign nation and its
state and a new type of ‘man’, the national citizen, came into existence and
became the beneficiary of rights. In a paradoxical fashion, the declaration of
universal principle established local sovereignty. From that point, statehood
and territory follow a national principle and belong to a dual time. If the
declaration inaugurated modernity, it also started nationalism and its
consequences: genocide, ethnic and civil war, ethnic cleansing, minorities,
refugees, the stateless. The spatial principle is clear: every state and
territory should have its unique dominant nation and every nation should have
its own state – a catastrophic development for peace as its extreme application
since 1989 has shown.

The new temporal principle replaced religious eschatology
with a historical teleology, which promised the future suturing of humanity and
nation. This teleology has two possible variants: either the nation imposes its
rule on humanity or universalism undermines parochial divides and identities.
Both variants became apparent when the Romans turned Stoic cosmopolitanism into
the imperial legal regulation of jus gentium. In France, the first alternative
appeared in the Napoleonic war, which allegedly spread the civilizing influence
through conquest and occupation (according to Hegel, Napoleon was the world
spirit on horseback); while the second was the beginning of a modern
cosmopolitanism, in which slavery was abolished and colonial people were given
political rights for a limited time after the Revolution. From the imperial
deformation of Stoic cosmopolitanism to the current use of human rights to
legitimize Western global hegemony, every normative universalism has decayed
into imperial globalism. The split between normative and empirical humanity
resists its healing, precisely because universal normativity has been
invariably defined by a part of humanity.

The universal humanity of liberal constitutions was the
normative ground of division and exclusion. A gap was opened between universal
“man,” the ontological principle of modernity, and national citizen, its
political instantiation and the real beneficiary of rights. The nation-state
came into existence through the exclusion of other people and nations. The
modern subject reaches her humanity by acquiring political rights of
citizenship, which guarantee her admission to the universal human nature by excluding
from that status others. The alien as a non-citizen is the modern barbarian. He
does not have rights because he is not part of the state and he is a lesser
human being because he is not a citizen. One is a man to greater or lesser
degree because one is a citizen to a greater or lesser degree. The alien is the
gap between man and citizen.

In our globalised world, not to have citizenship, to be
stateless or a refugee, is the worst fate. Strictly speaking, human rights do
not exist: if they are given to people on account of their humanity and not of
some lower level group membership, then refugees, the sans papiers migrants and
prisoners in Guatanamo Bay and similar detention centers, who have little if
any legal protection, should be their main beneficiaries. They have few, if
any, rights. They are legally abandoned, bare life, the homines sacri of the
new world order.

The epochal move to the subject is driven and exemplified by
legal personality. As species existence, the “man” of the rights of man appears
without gender, color, history, or tradition. He has no needs or desires, he is
an empty vessel united with all others through three abstract traits: free
will, reason, and the soul (now the mind) — the universal elements of human
essence. This minimum of humanity allows “man” to claim autonomy, moral
responsibility, and legal subjectivity. At the same time, the empirical man who
actually enjoys the ‘rights of man’ is a man all too man: a well-off,
heterosexual, white, urban male who condenses in his person the abstract
dignity of humanity and the real prerogatives of belonging to the community of
the powerful. A second exclusion therefore conditions humanism, humanity and
its rights. Mankind excludes improper men, that is, men of no property or
propriety, humans without rhyme and reason, women, racial, and ethnic sexual
minorities. Rights construct humans against a variable inhumanity or
anthropology. Indeed these “inhuman conditions of humanity,” as Pheng Cheah has
called them, act as quasi-transcendental preconditions of modern life.11

The contemporary history of human rights can be seen as the
ongoing and always failing struggle to close the gap between the abstract man
and the concrete citizen; to add flesh, blood and sex to the pale outline of
the ‘human’ and extend the dignities and privileges of the powerful (the
characteristics of normative humanity) to empirical humanity. This has not
happened however and is unlikely to be achieved through the action of rights.

Thesis 3

The post-1989 order combines an economic system that
generates huge structural inequalities and oppression with a juridico-political
ideology promising dignity and equality. This major instability is contributing
to its demise.

Why and how did this combination of neo-liberal capitalism
and humanitarianism emerge? Capitalism has always moralized the economy and
applied a gloss of righteousness to profit-making and unregulated competition
precisely because it is so hard to believe. From Adam Smith's ‘hidden hand’ to
the assertion that unrestrained egotism promotes the common good or that
beneficial effects ‘trickle down’ if the rich get even bigger tax breaks,
capitalism has consistently tried to claim the moral high ground.12

Similarly, human rights and their dissemination are not
simply the result of the liberal or charitable disposition of the West. The
predominantly negative meaning of freedom as the absence of external
constraints – a euphemism for keeping state regulation of the economy at a
minimum – has dominated the Western conception of human rights and turned them
into the perfect companion of neo-liberalism. Global moral and civic rules are
the necessary companion of the globalization of economic production and
consumption, of the completion of world capitalism that follows neo-liberal
dogmas. Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed, without much comment, the
creation of global legal rules regulating the world capitalist economy, including
rules on investment, trade, aid, and intellectual property. Robert Cooper has
called it the voluntary imperialism of the global economy. “It is operated by
an international consortium of financial Institutions such as the IMF and the
World Bank…These institutions…make demands, which increasingly emphasise good
governance. If states wish to benefit, they must open themselves up to the
interference of international organisations and foreign states.” Cooper
concludes that “what is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one
acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values.”13

The (implicit) promise to the developing world is that the
violent or voluntary adoption of the market-led, neo-liberal model of good
governance and limited rights will inexorably lead to Western economic
standards. This is fraudulent. Historically, the Western ability to turn the
protection of formal rights into a limited guarantee of material, economic, and
social rights was partly based on huge transfers from the colonies to the
metropolis. While universal morality militates in favor of reverse flows,
Western policies on development aid and Third World debt indicate that this is
not politically feasible. Indeed, the successive crises and re-arrangements of
neoliberal capitalism lead to dispossession and displacement of family farming
by agribusiness, to forced migration and urbanization. These processes expand
the number of people without skills, status, or the basics for existence. They
become human debris, the waste-life, the bottom billions. This neo-colonial
attitude has now been extended from the periphery to the European core. Greece,
Portugal, Ireland, and Spain have been subjected to the rigors of the
neoliberal “Washington Consensus” of austerity and destruction of the welfare
state, despite its failure in the developing world. More than half the young
people of Spain and Greece are permanently unemployed and a whole generation is
being destroyed. But this gene-cide, to coin a term, has not generated a human
rights campaign.

As Immanuel Wallerstein put it, “if all humans have equal
rights, and all the peoples have equal rights, then we cannot maintain the kind
of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world economy has always been and
always will be.”14 When the unbridgeability of the gap between the missionary
statements on equality and dignity and the bleak reality of obscene inequality
becomes apparent, human rights will lead to new and uncontrollable types of
tension and conflict. Spanish soldiers met the advancing Napoleonic armies
shouting “Down with freedom!” Today people meet the ‘peacekeepers’ of the new
world order with cries of “Down with human rights!”

Social and political systems become hegemonic by turning
their ideological priorities into universal principles and values. In the new
world order, human rights are the perfect candidate for this role. Their core
principles, interpreted negatively and economically, promote neo-liberal
capitalist penetration. Under a different construction, their abstract
provisions could subject the inequalities and indignities of late capitalism to
withering attack. But this cannot happen as long as they are used by the
dominant powers to spread the ‘values’ of an ideology based on the nihilism and
insatiability of desire.

Despite differences in content, colonialism and the human
rights movement form a continuum, episodes in the same drama, which started
with the great discoveries of the new world and is now carried out in the
streets of Iraq and Afghanistan: bringing civilization to the barbarians. The
claim to spread Reason and Christianity gave western empires their sense of
superiority and their universalizing impetus. The urge is still there; the
ideas have been redefined but the belief in the universality of our world-view
remains as strong as that of the colonialists. There is little difference
between imposing reason and good governance and proselytizing for Christianity
and human rights. They are both part of the cultural package of the West,
aggressive and redemptive at the same time.

Thesis 4

Universalism and communitarianism rather than being
opponents are two types of humanism dependent on each other. They are
confronted by the ontology of singular equality

The debate about the meaning of humanity as the ground
normative source is conducted between universalists and communitarians. The
universalist claims that cultural values and moral norms should pass a test of
universal applicability and logical consistency and often concludes that, if
there is one moral truth but many errors, it is incumbent upon its agents to
impose it on others.

Communitarians start from the obvious observation that
values are context-bound and try to impose them on those who disagree with the
oppressiveness of tradition. Both principles, when they become absolute
essences and define the meaning and value of humanity without remainder, can
find everything that resists them expendable.

Kosovo is a good example. The proud Serbians killed and
‘cleansed’ ethnic Albanians in order to protect the integrity of the ‘cradle’
of their nation (interestingly, like most wild nationalisms, celebrating a
historic defeat). NATO bombers killed people in Belgrade and Kosovo from 35,000
feet in order to defend the rights of humanity. Both positions exemplify,
perhaps in different ways, the contemporary metaphysical urge: they have made
an axiomatic decision as to what constitutes the essence of humanity and follow
it with a stubborn disregard for alternatives. They are the contemporary
expressions of a humanism that defines the ‘essence’ of humanity all the way to
its end, as telos and finish. To paraphrase Emanuel Levinas, to save the human
we must defeat this type of humanism.

The individualism of universal principles forgets that every
person is a world and comes into existence in common with others, that we are
all in community. Every human is a singular being, unique in her existence as
an unrepeatable concatenation of past encounters, desires, and dreams with
future projections, expectations, and plans. Every single person forms a
phenomenological cosmos of meaning and intentionality, in relations of desire
conversation and recognition with others. Being in common is an integral part
of being self: self is exposed to the other, it is posed in exteriority, the
other is part of the intimacy of self. My face is “always exposed to others,
always turned toward an other and faced by him or her never facing myself.”15

Indeed being in community with others is the opposite of
common being or of belonging to an essential community. Communitarians, on the
other hand, define community through the commonality of tradition, history, and
culture, the various past crystallizations whose inescapable weight determines
present possibilities. The essence of the communitarian community is often to
compel or ‘allow’ people to find their ‘essence,’ common ‘humanity’ now defined
as the spirit of the nation or of the people or the leader. We have to follow
traditional values and exclude what is alien and other. Community as communion
accepts human rights only to the extent that they help submerge the I into the
We, all the way till death, the point of ‘absolute communion’ with dead tradition.16

Both universal morality and cultural identity express
different aspects of human experience. Their comparison in the abstract is
futile and their differences are not pronounced. When a state adopts
‘universal’ human rights, it will interpret and apply them, if at all,
according to local legal procedures and moral principles, making the universal
the handmaiden of the particular. The reverse is also true: even those legal
systems that jealously guard traditional rights and cultural practices against
the encroachment of the universal are already contaminated by it. All rights
and principles, even if parochial in their content, share the universalizing
impetus of their form. In this sense, rights carry the seed of the dissolution
of community and the only defense is to resist the idea of rights altogether,
something impossible in global neo-liberalism. The claims of universality and
tradition, rather than standing opposed in mortal combat, have become uneasy
allies, whose fragile liaison has been sanctioned by the World Bank.

From our perspective, humanity cannot act as a normative
principle.. Humanity is not a property shared. It is discernible in the
incessant surprising of the human condition and its exposure to an undecided
open future. Its function lies not in a philosophical essence but in its
non-essence, in the endless process of re-definition and the necessary but
impossible attempt to escape external determination. Humanity has no foundation
and no end; it is the definition of groundlessness.

Rights form the terrain on which people are distributed into
rulers, ruled, and excluded. Power's mode of operation is revealed, if we
observe which people are given or deprived of which rights at which particular
place or point in time. In this sense, human rights both conceal and affirm the
dominant structure of a period and help combat it. Marx was the first to
realize the paradoxical nature of rights. Natural rights emerged as a symbol of
universal emancipation, but they were at the same time a powerful weapon in the
hands of the rising capitalist class, securing and naturalizing emerging
dominant economic and social relations. They were used to take out of political
challenge the central institutions of capitalism such as religion, property,
contractual relations and the family, thus providing the best protection
possible. Ideologies, private interests, and egotistical concerns appear
natural, normal, and for the public good when they are glossed over by rights
vocabulary. As Marx inimitably put it, “freedom, equality, property and
Bentham.”17

Early human rights were historical victories of groups and
individuals against state power while at the same time promoting a new type of
domination. As Giorgio Agamben argues, they “simultaneously prepared a tacit
but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus
offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from
which they wanted to liberate themselves.”18 In late capitalism, with its
proliferating bio-political regulation, the endlessly multiplying rights
paradoxically increase power's investment on bodies.

If classical natural rights protected property and religion
by making them ‘apolitical’, the main effect of rights today is to depoliticize
politics itself. Let us introduce a key distinction in recent political
philosophy between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique).
According to Chantal Mouffe, politics is the terrain of routine political life,
the activity of debating, lobbying, and horse-trading that takes places around
Westminster and Capitol Hill.19 The ‘political,’ on the other hand, refers to
the way in which the social bond is instituted and concerns deep rifts in
society. The political is the expression and articulation of the irreducibility
of social conflict. Politics organizes the practices and institutions through
which order is created, normalizing social co-existence in the context of
conflict provided by the political.

This deep antagonism is the result of the tension between
the structured social body, where every group has its role, function, and
place, and what Jacques Rancière calls “the part of no part.” Groups that have
been radically excluded from the social order; they are invisible, outside the
established sense of what exists and is acceptable. Politics proper erupts only
when an excluded part demands to be included and must change the rules of
inclusion to achieve that. When they succeed, a new political subject is
constituted, in excess to the hierarchized and visible group of groups and a
division is put in the pre-existing common sense.20

What is the role of human rights in this division between
politics and the political? Right claims reinforce rather than challenge
established arrangements. The claimant accepts the established power and
distribution orders and transforms the political claim into a demand for
admission to the law. The role of law is to transform social and political tensions
into a set of solvable problems regulated by rules and hand them over to rule
experts. The rights claimant is the opposite of the revolutionaries of the
early declarations, whose task was to change the overall design of the law. To
this extent, his actions abandon the original commitment of rights to resist
and oppose oppression and domination. The ‘excessive’ subjects, who stand for
the universal from a position of exclusion, have been replaced by social and
identity groups seeking recognition and limited re-distribution.

In the new world order the right-claims of the excluded are
foreclosed by political, legal, and military means. Economic migrants,
refugees, prisoners of the war on terror, the sans papiers, inhabitants of
African camps, these ‘one use humans’ are the indispensable precondition of
human rights but, at the same time, they are the living, or rather dying, proof
of their impossibility. Successful human rights struggles have undoubtedly
improved the lives of people by marginal re-arrangements of social hierarchies
and non-threatening re-distributions of the social product. But their effect is
to de-politicize conflict and remove the possibility of radical change.

We can conclude that human rights claims and struggles bring
to the surface the exclusion, domination and exploitation, and inescapable
strife that permeates social and political life. But, at the same time, they
conceal the deep roots of strife and domination by framing struggle and
resistance in the terms of legal and individual remedies which, if successful,
lead to small individual improvements and a marginal re-arrangement of the
social edifice. Can human rights re-activate a politics of resistance? The
intrinsic link between early natural rights, (religious) transcendence, and
political radicalism opened the possibility. It is still active in parts of the
world not fully incorporated in the biopolitical operations of power. But only
just. The metaphysics of the age is that of the deconstruction of essence and
meaning, the closing of the divide between ideal and real, the subjection of
the universal to the dominant particular. Economic globalization and semiotic
monolingualism are carrying this task out in practice; its intellectual
apologists do it in theory. The political and moral duty of the critic is to
keep the rift open and to discover and fight for transcendence in immanence.

Thesis 6

In advanced capitalist societies, human rights become
strategies for the publicization and legalization of (insatiable) individual
desire.

Liberal theories from Immanuel Kant to John Rawls present
the self as a solitary and rational entity endowed with natural characteristics
and rights and in full control of himself. Rights to life, liberty, and
property are presented as integral to humanity's well-being. The social
contract (or its heuristic restatement through the “original position”) creates
society and government but preserves these rights and makes them binding on
government. Rights and today human rights are pre-social, they belong to humans
precisely because they are humans. We use this natural patrimony as tools or
instruments to confront the outside world, to defend our interests, and to
pursue our life plans

This position is sharply contrasted by Hegelian and Marxist
dialectics, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. The human self is not a stable and
isolated entity that, once formed, goes into the world and acts according to
pre-arranged motives and intentions. Self is created through constant
interactions with others, the subject is always inter-subjective. My identity
is constructed in an ongoing dialogue and struggle for recognition, in which
others (both people and institutions) acknowledge certain characteristics,
attributes, and traits as mine, helping create my own sense of self. Identity
emerges out of this conversation and struggle with others which follows the
dialectic of desire. Law is a tool and effect of this dialectic; human rights
acknowledge the constitutive role of desire.

Hegel's basic idea can be put simply. The self is both
separate from and dependent upon the external world. Dependence on the not-I,
both the object and the other person, makes the self realize that he is not
complete but lacking and that he is constantly driven by desire. Life is a
continuous struggle to overcome the foreignness of the other person or object.
Survival depends on overcoming this radical split from the not-I, while
maintaining the sense of uniqueness of self.21

Identity is therefore dynamic always on the move. I am in
ongoing dialogue with others, a conversation that keeps changing others and
re-drawing my own self-image. Human rights do not belong to humans and do not
follow the dictates of humanity; they construct humans. A human being is someone
who can successfully claim human rights and the group of rights we have
determines how “human” we are; our identity depends on the bunch of rights we
can successfully mobilize in relations with others. If this is the case, rights
must be linked with deep-seated psychological functions and needs. From the
heights of Hegelian dialectics, we now move to the much darker territory of
Freudian psychoanalysis.

Jus vitam institutare, the law constitutes life, states a
Roman maxim. For psychoanalysis it remains true. We become independent,
speaking subjects by entering the symbolic order of language and law. But this
first ‘symbolic castration’ must be supplemented by a second that makes us
legal subjects. It introduces us into the social contract leaving behind the
family life of protection, love, and care. The symbolic order imposes upon us
the demands of social life. God, King, or the Sovereign act as universal
fathers, representing an omnipotent and unitary social power, which places us
in the social division of labor. If, according to Jacques Lacan, the name of
the father makes us speaking subjects, the name of the Sovereign turns us into
legal subjects and citizens.

This second entry into the law denies, like symbolic
castration, the perceived wholeness of family intimacy and replaces it with
partial recognitions and incomplete entitlements. Rights by their nature cannot
treat the whole person. In law, a person is never a complete being but a
persona, ritual or theatrical mask, that hides his or her face under a
combination of partial rights. The legal subject is a combination of
overlapping and conflicting rights and duties; they are law's blessing and
curse. Rights are manifestations of individual desire as well as tools of
societal bonding. Following the standard Lacanian division, rights have
symbolic, imaginary, and real aspects. Their symbolic function places us in the
social division of labor, hierarchy, and exclusion, the imaginary gives us a
(false) sense of wholeness while the real disrupts the pleasures of the
symbolic and the falsifications of the imaginary. Psychoanalysis offers the
most advanced explanation of the constitutive and contradictory work of rights.

The symbolic function of rights bestows legal personality
and introduces people to independence away from the intimacy of family. Law and
rights construct a formal structure, which allocates us to a place in a matrix
of relations strictly indifferent to the needs or desires of flesh and blood
people. Legal rights offer the minimum recognition of abstract humanity, formal
equivalence and moral responsibility, irrespective of individual
characteristics. At the same time, they place people on a grid of distinct and
hierarchical roles and functions, of prohibitions, entitlements and exclusions.
Social and economic rights add a layer of difference to abstract similarity;
they recognize gender, race, religion, and sexuality, in part moving
recognition from the abstract equality of humanity to differentiated qualities,
characteristics, and predications. Human rights may promise universal happiness
but their empirical existence and enforcement depends on genealogies,
hierarchies of power and contingencies that allocate the necessary resources
ignoring and dismissing expectations or needs. The legal person that rights and
duties construct resembles a caricature of the actual human self. The face has
been replaced by an image in the cubist style; the nose comes out of the mouth,
eyes protrude on the sides, forehead and chin are reversed. It projects a
three-dimensional object onto a flat canvas.

The integrity of self denied by the symbolic order of rights
returns in the imaginary. Human rights promise an end to conflict, social peace
and well-being (the pursuit of happiness was an early promise in the American
Declaration of Independence). A society of rights offers an ideal place, a
stage and supplement for the ideal ego. As a man of rights, I see myself as
someone with dignity, respect, and self-respect, at peace with the world. A
society that guarantees rights is a good place, peaceful and affluent, a social
order made for and fitting the individual who stands at its center. A legal
system that protects rights is rationally coherent and closed (Ronald Dworkin
calls it a “seamless web”), morally good (it has principles and the consequent
“right” answers to all “hard” problems), pragmatically efficient.

The imaginary domain of rights creates an immediate, imaged
and imagined bond, between the subject, her ideal ego, and the world. Human
rights project a fantasy of wholeness, which unites body and soul into an
integrated self. It is a beautiful self that fits in a good world, a society
made for the subject. The anticipated completeness, the projected future
integrity that underpins present identity is non-existent and impossible
however and, moreover, differs from person to person and from community to
community. Our imaginary identification with a good society accepts too easily
that the language, signs and images of human rights are (or can become) our reality.
The right to work, people assert, exists since it is written in the Universal
Declaration, the international Covenants, the Constitution, the law, the
statements of politicians. Billions of people have no food, no employment, no
education, or health care – but this brutal fact does not weaken the assertion
of the ideal. The necessary replacement of materiality by signs, of needs and
desires by words and images makes people believe that the mere existence of
legal texts and institutions, with little performance or action, affects and
completes bodies.

The imaginary promoted by human rights enthusiasts presents
a world made for my sake, in which the law meets (or ought to and will meet) my
desires. This happy identification with the social and legal system is based on
misrecognition. The world is indifferent to my being, happiness or travails.
The law is not coherent or just. Morality is not law's business and peace is
always temporary and precarious, never perpetual. The state of eu zein or
well-being, the terminal point of human rights, is always deferred, its promise
postponed its performance impossible. For the middle classes, to be sure, human
rights are birth-right and patrimony. For the unfortunates of the world, on the
other hand, they are only vague promises, fake supports for offering obedience,
with their delivery permanently frustrated. Like the heaven of Christianity,
human rights form a receding horizon that allows people to endure daily
humiliations and subjugations.

The imaginary of rights is gradually replacing social
justice. The decolonization struggles, the civil rights and counter-cultural
movements fought for an ideal society based on justice and equality. In the
human rights age, the pursuit of collective material welfare has given way to
individual gratification and the avoidance of evil. The rights imaginary goes
into overdrive when it turns images into “reality,” when legal clauses and
terms replace food and shelter, when weasel words become the garb and grab of
power. Rights emphasize the individual, his autonomy, and his place in the
world. Like all imaginary identifications, they repress the recognition that
the subject is inter-subjective and that the economic and social order is
strictly indifferent to the fate of any particular individual. According to
Louis Althusser, ideology is not “false consciousness” but is made up of ways
of living, practices, and experiences that misrecognize our place in the world.
It is “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence.” In this sense, human rights are ideology at its strongest but one
very different from that of Michael Ignatieff.22

Finally, the symbolic and imaginary operation of rights
finds its limit in the real. We hover around the vortex of the real: the lack
at the core of subjectivity both causes our projects to fail and creates the
drive to continue the effort. When we make a demand, we not only ask the other
to fulfill a need but also to offer us unreserved love. An infant, who asks for
his mother's breast, needs food but also asks for his mother's attention and
love. Desire is always the desire of the other and signifies precisely the
excess of demand over need. Each time my need for an object enters language and
addresses the other, it is the request for recognition and love. But this
demand for wholeness and unqualified recognition cannot be met by the big Other
(language, law, the state) or the other person. The big Other is the cause and
symbol of lack. The other person cannot offer what the subject lacks because he
is also lacking. In our appeal to the other, we confront lack, a lack that can
neither be filled nor fully symbolized.

Rights allow us to express our needs in language by
formulating them as a demand. A human rights claim involves two demands
addressed to the other: a specific request in relation to one aspect of the
claimant's personality or status (such as to be left alone, not to suffer in
one's bodily integrity, and to be treated equally), but, in addition, a much
wider demand to have one's whole identity recognized in its specific
characteristics. When a person of color claims, for example, that the rejection
of a job application amounted to a denial of her human right to
non-discrimination, she makes two related but relatively independent claims.
The rejection is both to an unfair denial of the applicant's need for a job but
also it denigrates her wider identity. Every right therefore links a need of a
part of the body or personality with what exceeds need, the desire that the
claimant be recognized and loved as a whole and complete person.

The subject of rights tries to find the missing object that
will fill lack and turn him into a complete integral being in the desire of the
other. But this object does not exist and cannot be possessed. Rights offer the
hope that subject and society can become whole: ‘if only my attributes and
characteristics were given legal recognition, I would be happy’; ‘if only the
demands of human dignity and equality were fully enforced, society would be
just.’ But desire cannot be fulfilled. Rights become a fantastic supplement
that arouses but never satiates the subject's desire. Rights always agitate for
more rights. They lead to new areas of claim and entitlement that again and
again prove insufficient.

Today human rights have become the mark of civility. But
their success is limited. No right can earn me the full recognition and love of
the other. No bill of rights can complete the struggle for a just society.
Indeed the more rights we introduce, the greater the pressure is to legislate
for more, to enforce them better, to turn the person into an infinite collector
of rights, and to turn humanity into an endlessly proliferating mosaic of laws.
The law keeps colonizing life and the social world, while the endless spiral of
more rights, acquisitions, and possessions fuels the subject's imagination and
dominates the symbolic world. Rights become the reward for psychological lack
and political impotence. Fully positivized rights and legalized desire extinguish
the self-creating potential of human rights. They become the symptom of
all-devouring desire – a sign of the Sovereign or the individual – and at the
same time its partial cure. In a strange and paradoxical twist, the more rights
we have the more insecure we feel.

But there is one right that is closely linked with the real
of radical desire: the right to resistance and revolt. This right is close to
the death drive, to the repressed call to transcend the distributions of the
symbolic order and the genteel pleasures of the imaginary for something closer
to our destructive and creative inner kernel. Taking risks and not giving up on
your desire is the ethical call of psychoanalysis. Resistance and revolution is
their social equivalent. In the same way that the impossible and disavowed real
organizes the psyche, the right to resistance forms the void at the heart of
the system of law, which protects it from sclerosis and ossification.23

We can conclude that rights are about recognition (symbolic)
and distribution (imaginary); except that there is a right to
resistance/revolt.

Thesis 7

For a cosmopolitanism to come (or the idea of communism).

Against imperial arrogance and cosmopolitan naivety, we must
insist that global neo-liberal capitalism and human-rights-for-export are part
of the same project. The two must be uncoupled; human rights can contribute
little to the struggle against capitalist exploitation and political
domination. Their promotion by western states and humanitarians turns them into
a palliative: it is useful for a limited protection of individuals but it can
blunt political resistance. Human rights can re-claim their redemptive role in
the hands and imagination of those who return them to the tradition of
resistance and struggle against the advice of the preachers of moralism,
suffering humanity, and humanitarian philanthropy.

Liberal equality as a regulative principle has failed to
close the gap between rich and poor. Equality must become an axiomatic
presupposition: People are free and equal; equality is not the effect but the
premise of action. Whatever denies this simple truth creates a right and duty
of resistance. The equality of legal rights has consistently supported
inequality; axiomatic equality (each counts as one in all relevant groups) is
the impossible boundary of rights culture. It means that healthcare is due to
everyone who needs it, irrespective of means; that rights to residence and work
belong to all who find themselves in a part of the world irrespective of nationality;
that political activities can be freely engaged by all irrespective of
citizenship and against the explicit prohibitions of human rights law.

The combination of the right to resistance and axiomatic
equality projects a humanity opposed both to universal individualism and
communitarian closure. In the age of globalization, of mondialization we suffer
from a poverty of world. Each one is a cosmos but we no longer have a world,
only a series of disconnected situations. Everyone a world: a knot of past events
and stories, people and encounters, desires and dreams. This is also the point
of ekstasis, of opening up and moving away, immortals in our mortality,
symbolically finite but imaginatively infinite. The cosmopolitan capitalists
promise to make us citizens of the world under a global sovereign and a
well-defined and terminal humanity. This is the universalization of the lack of
world, the imperialism and empiricism to which every cosmopolitanism falls.

But we should not give up the universalizing impetus of the
imaginary, the cosmos that uproots every polis, disturbs every filiation,
contests all sovereignty and hegemony. Resistance and radical equality map out
an imaginary domain of rights which is uncannily close to utopia. According to
Ernst Bloch, the present foreshadows a future not yet and, one should add, not
ever possible. The future projection of an order in which man is no longer a
“degraded, enslaved, abandoned or, despised being” links the best traditions of
the past with a powerful “reminiscence of the future.”24 It disturbs the linear
concept of time and, like psychoanalysis, it imagines the present in the image
of a prefigured beautiful future, which however will never come to be. In this
sense, the imaginary domain is necessarily utopian, non-existing. And yet, this
non-place or nothingness grounds our sense of identity, in the same way that
utopia helps create a sense of social identity. We have re-discovered in
Tunisia and Tahrir Square, in Madrid's Puerta del Sol and Athens’ Syntagma Square
what goes beyond and against liberal cosmopolitanism, the principle of its
excess. This is the promise of the cosmopolitanism to come – or the idea of
communism.25

The cosmopolitanism to come is neither the terrain of
nations nor an alliance of classes, although it draws from the treasure of
solidarity. Dissatisfaction with the nation, state, and the inter-national
comes from a bond between singularities, which cannot be turned into essential
humanity, nation, or state. The cosmos to come is the world of each unique one,
of whoever or anyone; the polis, the infinite encounters of singularities. What
binds me to a Palestinian, a sans papiers migrant, or an unemployed youth is
not membership of humanity, nation, state, or community but a bond that cannot be
contained in the dominant interpretations of humanity and cosmos or of polis
and state.

Law, the principle of the polis, prescribes what constitutes
a reasonable order by accepting and validating some parts of collective life,
while banning, excluding others, making them invisible. Law and rights link
language with things or beings; they nominate what exists and condemn the rest
to invisibility and marginality. As the formal and dominant decision about
existence, law carries huge ontological power. Radical desire, on the other
hand is the longing for what has been banned and declared impossible by the
law; what confronts past catastrophes and incorporates the promise of the
future.

The axiom of equality and the right to resistance prepare
militant subjects in the ongoing struggle between justice and injustice. This
being together of singularities in resistance is constructed here and now with
friends and strangers in acts of hospitality, in cities of resistance, Cairo,
Madrid, Athens.

NOTES

1- Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart,
2000); Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence (Oxford: Hart,
2005); Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).
This essay summarizes and moves forward this alternative approach to rights.
The final part of this work entitled The Radical Philosophy of Right will be
published by Routledge in 2014.

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